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So, I’m sitting here on my terrace after midnight listening to Radiohead mixed with the usual hum of ACs of the surrounding apartment buildings. It’s a clear and hot night and for a change you can actually make out a couple of stars in the usually bland, light polluted, sky…but oh well that kind of sounds negative, which it isn’t. It’s NICE.

Anyway. Today we’re starting our third week of ‘the MET’ and so far it treated me quite nicely, to say the least. I did 9 shows in the first two weeks, including Basil in DonQ, which was intense, satifying but as always not perfect and two shows of Tudor’s Shadowplay. Let me elaborate on this one.
I’ll let Anthony Tudor and Anthony Dowell speak first. There is a wonderful clip on Youtube, (I suspect) a BBC documentary having been translated to German. You can barely make out what both of them are saying in English, but I’ll do a rough translation for you paraphrasing what is said in German:

January 1967, a new ballet. Shadowplay, music by Koechlin, choreography Anthony Tudor…(now the hero, a quest for Nirvana, the boy with the matted hair…)
A. Dowell: When you start very young, you’re very flexible and think you can do anything. Suddenly after a couple of years comes a challenge (or a step) which you cannot master. You are absolutely stuck and are unable to do it. With that experience Shadowplay was a tremendous help for me since instead of concentrating on mastering the sequence of steps I could focus on the plot and what I was trying to project.
A. Tudor: I said where do you think we should start? Would you prefer too enter from stage left or stage right? He said he didn’t care. I continued to ask him mentioning that he probably had some idea, but he didn’t care. I wanted to know if he wanted to to start downstage or upstage and he said he again didn’t care. Well I said, maybe you want to start in center or on the side…By that moment he thought I was a nut and became nervous…
A Dowell: Then he said look up the tree, what kind of tree is it? I was literally shocked since I have never, in my imagination, visualized a tree, I just looked up…
A Tudor: I said: ‘Tell me by your body! I want to know, if it is a little tree or a big tree or a [] shaped tree’ and we decided to continue the next day.  On the next day on my way to work, at Earl Court, I saw a wondeerful mango tree in a showcase, the first I have ever seen in London. I bought it and brought it with me to the studio, but hid the tree. I encouraged Anthony to start with the tree right away that day. He told me there is none. At that moment I got out the mango tree and told him that the tree is here. He said: ‘What is it’? He most likely never saw a mango in his life before. His eyes opened with wonderment, he looked up the tree and it was perfect.
A Dowell: Shadwoplay was the most important ballet for me and my development.

These are strong words coming from the creators of the piece and I can definitely relate to the fact that it is an experience and an experience which brought me further, not knowing where exactly further. After performing it for two times I was as much emotionally exhausted as I was enriched by the experience.
By the way, here is the mango tree Mr. Tudor was talking about:

Oh, and here are some pictures from my mid-show tweets and other behind-the-scene footage As always enjoy and cheers!

MET_2011_2

19 Photos

Damn. It has been almost 3 (!) months since my last post. Seems like a long time, and indeed a lot of things happened… We (ABT) premiered Alexei Ratmansky’s new Nutcracker at BAM in Brooklyn, rehearsed for two weeks, then premiered Ratmansky’s Bright Stream in Washington DC at the Kennedy Center for Performing Arts in the end of January, rehearsed for a week back in NY and then performed for a week at Sadler’s Wells in London (beginning of February). There I debuted in Balanchine’s Theme & Variations and had a company-debut in Balanchine’s Tchaikovsky Pas de Deux.
After London I took 10 days off visiting friends and family in Frankfurt, Hamburg, Essen, Munich and Vienna and after that stopped by in Kiev to get new costumes tailored. Now we are rehearsing Shadowplay, Coppelia, Don Q and creating a new ballet by Benjamin Millepied for our tour to the Bolshoi theater in Moscow in the end of March.

So here I am sitting on a Sunday night after having watched the Oscars with friends, writing this blog entry and editing the pictures from Taipei this summer. I don’t have much too say except that I’m doing well and trying to live my life as well as it gets. So many things are happening right now that I try to live day by day, moment by moment, task by task…so far, so good…

…damn, this all sounds so self-conscious…almost as much as the Oscars…but oh well.

And as always…I’ll try to post more often.

Cheers and enjoy the photos.

-D.

Well, what can I say. I am sitting here at 4am, packing for my various trips and cannot sleep… We are traveling tomorrow with ABT to LA and then I am off to various other places on the globe, but let me first recollect my experiences here in New York.

The season at the Metropolitan Opera, which always lasts 2 months in the year in the summer here in the currently hot and humid New York, is on the one side my favorite time of the year… on the other side I feel like all of us dancers at ABT definitely grow a couple of extra gray hairs in the process.

I feel extremely privileged to perform on such a special stage in front of up to 4000 viewers each night. Every week we perform different ballets, which means we rehearse one ballet and perform another one (or even various roles) in the evening (which differs from the usual European system…) To a certain degree there are times when everyone is on edge, physically and of course mentally. To put it in concrete terms, I performed in 11 different things in the course of this season. In the middle of it I suffered a minor ankle injury (from which I am still slightly recovering). I cried… I laughed… and I felt every and anything in between.

Nevertheless it is a special kind of sensation (and I’m trying now not  to be too clichée ) to be finished with the season. When it begins it seems it’s never-ending. When it ends, it seems like the time flew by like nothing.

To be honest I feel I cannot express myself in words well enough. I’m not a words person. I appreciate the written word, but am incapable of creating something worth of what I am trying to say.  I better stop and go to sleep. Enjoy the pictures. They hopefully capture a teeny-tiny-little bit of my life.
No more, no less.

I wrote that one  post on a flight, most of which is mindless mumbling…anyway someone might like to  still read it…:

Another flight. A lot of time to spend as useful as possible.
Well, I am in the plane from Franfurt to Korea and actually I kinda get really used to fly these days lol. Some twenty hours ago I was in St. Petersburg Russia dancing Les Bourgeois in an Openair gala performance. Performance went fine, but for the first time I experienced what the people call the white nights in Russia.

White Nights

First what comes to my mind is of course the infamous hollywood-cold war-anti-soviet-kitchy-love story-movie ‚White Nights‘ with our beloved Mikhail Baryshnikov, which probably saw a lot of people not because of the wonderful story, but because of the actors playing in it.
Anyway here is the probably most famous excerpt of the movie:

When it’s bright in the night the night(-life) itself feels different, more alive (I know this sounds weird). But anyway I think I just got a small ‚touch‘ what the White nights are about.
Anyway of course this night I didn’t sleep due to the fact that I was picked up at 3:30 in the morning which was 1:30am in Frankfurt (where I travelled from the day before.) I flied back to Frankfurt, where I slept and repacked my things. And now I am back in the plane flying to Seoul where I will be performing in two Galas and staying almost for a week.

Somehow flying becomes for me to be something special, something more and more useful. I can feel how I can use my time every time better and better with things I still have to do or want to do. I learn how to keep my efficiency up on a high level and it feels good therefore.
This is one thing I admire flying for and what brings me to talk about dance.
The same thing happens with my dancing. Every time I perform a step, every time I execute an exercise, or I perform a variation or an excerpt, it leads my body to heighten its efficiency. Well of course not every time. I was a little exaggerating. There are days the body cannot improve anything, some days it just has to keep the current status of shape, of control, of efficiency. I don’t think any dancers likes these days, since these days are unproductive.

Anyway I’m gone to watch another episode of House M.D. … anyway I’ll write again soon!

Dear readers, hereby I start my “Ask me a question” column . Just so you know it’s almost 2 am again and I have to get up in 6 hours so well… like always I’m feeding my insomnia

What do you enjoy doing when you have free time, and do you have enough time to meet your family ?
- Well what I like is eating, sleeping, recovering, complicated and sophisticated books, simple movies, everything high-fi, technical and mechanical, computers and design, hanging out and meeting friends, going out and having some time out, but only when I can afford it myself with my body and state of mind. Beside this I enjoy writing blog entries trying to put myself in a good light for everybody reading them, haha.
Furtunately I see my parents pretty often since they are not only my parents, but also work as my coaches, artistic advisors and psychotherapists. Therefore they try to come to me as often as possible to support me.

What is your favourite dance piece ?
- Albrecht in Giselle, which I’ll be hopefully doing next year.

Professional dancers do not seem to become nervous. Do you get nervous when you dance onstage?
- From my own experience a certain degree of nervousness has to be there to have a good performance. Nervousness heightens the awareness and sharpens the senses. It gives me more control and a complete fixation on the things I am doing. Through experience and repeating a dancer finds a good level of nervousness he needs. One needs more, one needs less, but in general a certain degree has to be there. If I am not nervous, because I am too familiar with the surroundings or the piece I am perfroming, I might get sloppy, that’s why I then artificially start myself to get nervous through routines I discovered work for me best. But by now I start to bore everyone with that, so I stop here

How/what do you feel when you are dancing ?
- Billy Elliot says: “Don’t know. Sorta feels good. Sorta stiff and that, but once I get going… then I like, forget everything. And… sorta disappear. Sorta disappear. Like I feel a change in my whole body. And I’ve got this fire in my body. I’m just there. Flyin’ ike a bird. Like electricity. Yeah, like electricity.”
Uhm…I know for everyone it’s different, but to me this quote sounds kinda kitschy and funny (sorry if I insulted somebody with that).
I don’t feel any elictricity. Nor Fire. Sorry if this sounds now very unspectacular, but I just try to completely focus on giving a good performance. I try to remember the mistakes I made before and to do the corrections I heard from my teachers. The only thing I ‘get’ from time to time is that I feel the audience. It’s hard to describe, but it’s like the audience becomes one ‘thing’, a creature which follows me and which I can control. I don’t see it, nor can I touch it. It’s one abstract whole, surveiling me.

——————-

Ok actually it’s really time I’m getting some sleep. I’m leaving for London to rehearse with my partner Roberta Marquez tomorrow, a principal dancer with the Royal Ballet in London, for our gala performance in New York in February. I ‘ll be staying only two days, so there is not much time.

Anyway good night to everybody and hope to hear from you.

PS: Thanks to Mi-Gyeong Song for the questions. If you out there have any more questions, please don’t hesitate to ask them.